There’s really no dignity in moving. 

    It starts with your possessions.  No matter how nice your stuff is or what kind of person you interact with, the moment you begin a move your stuff - the stuff you’ve worked a lifetime accumulating, the stuff you at some point couldn’t see yourself living well without - all that stuff becomes refereed to as “your shit.”

    “That your shit out there?”

    “You get your shit out yet?”

    “What are you going to do with that shit?”

    “Man, you still got a lot of shit.” 

    It goes on.  Even though some of my larger possessions were in fact shit (nearly all of my furniture was either a hand me down or found on the street curb and dumpster) it bothers me a little when someone refers to my stuff as “shit.”  Of course by the end of the move I was not only referring to it as “my shit” but often as “my fucking shit.” 

    If your stuff isn’t shit before a move, a good deal of it is after a move.  Supposedly one of the most stressful things a person can go through is a move but only an earthquake can turn your stuff to shit faster than a move.  What about a fire you ask?  Maybe.  But a fire can actually add value to your shit.  A fire can make it shit but it can make it valuable shit.  Stuff you wanted to get rid of before a fire becomes the most prized possession you have after you find it amongst ruins.  “Look, that thing I always hated!  It survived the fire.  I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”  But I’m getting off topic.

    It would be easy to blame that kind of scatter brained behavior on my lack of preparation and the time pressure I was working under but for me there’s no other way to move.  I can’t do a lot of things without pressure and I certainly can’t move my apartment unless I’m under the gun.  There’s no taking my time and making a run here and there.

    Basically anything that you have to move falls into one of two categories:  something you need or something that you have some kind of attachment to.  For me there’s no sense in moving stuff out of my apartment that I need until the last possible moment.  The things that fall into the second category make it impossible for me to move without a strict time pressure.  These items may be sentimental or intellectual or they may just make me wonder about who I was when I picked it up.  If I come across an old magazine article I’d saved, I’ll read the whole thing and the ads too.  If I find notes I’d written to myself I’ll go through some unexplainable process of trying to figure out whether I should save the note, where I should save the note, and maybe even add new notes to the old notes.  If I find an old birthday card from my Grandma I’ll scold myself for not writing her back and if I find an old Christmas card from a friend I’ll wonder whether it’s bad form to throw out a picture of baby’s first visit with Santa.  Before I know it, the day is gone and I’m more disorganized than I was when I started. 

    Now everything is being stored at a friend’s house.  Actually it’s not very accurate to call her a friend but I don’t quite know what to call her.  Let’s just say she’s the other half of a relationship that would inspire a guy to get his shit out and hit the road for a while. 

    8/14/08 - Postscript on moving things.  It turns out those plates weren’t the last things I left.  I left everything in my medicine cabinet which makes me insane.  I had just bought new blades for my razor and I had two brand new tooth brushes and toothpaste.  The past two days I’d held out hope - and held off brushing my teeth frankly, that I’d put them somewhere but I went through everything and - no.  I called the apartment management company and of course the workers claim they simply threw everything away.  How annoying.